Headline Hollywood: A discourse analysis of the Variety archive

By Bryan R. Sebok, Ph.D.

Lewis & Clark College

In September, 2010 Variety, the filmed entertainment industry’s
oldest industrial publication, announced that their entire 105-year history
would be made available in a digital archive. Each daily and weekly magazine
would be fully searchable by keyword, and would maintain original advertising
and pagination. According to Variety senior editor Timothy Gray,

“(t)he archives consist of 27,000 issues, more than 850,000 stories, 200,000 reviews and countless uses of slanguage and snappy headlines….The archives are intended to be a research tool but also provide entertainment. Some of the stories and advertisements are quaint, others perplexing. But much of it is surprisingly pertinent, such as an item about Disney experimenting with 3D -- in 1933.”1

This article will begin to explore the Variety archive while delineating
some key trends in industrial discourse during times of technological change,
focusing on the 1950s shifts to widescreen technologies.
While the Variety archives offer insight into but one of many possible
spheres of industrial discourse pertaining to new technologies, I argue that the
archive functions contemporarily as a theoretical intersection of archival
discourse, industrial discourse, questions pertaining to digital heritage, and
historiographic practices, thereby offering a rich terrain for theorization
related to meaning-making in the archive sector as well as the nature and scope
of historical inquiry.This project is part of a larger
longitudinal assessment of the Variety archives during times of technological
change throughout Hollywood history, including the coming of sound, the birth of
3-D, widescreen, the diffusion of color technologies, and the re-birth of 3-D in
the contemporary era. As the archives are examined across history,
comparative analysis reveals both consistencies and differences in how
technologies were made meaningful to readers at the time of publication and came
to be integrated into spheres of knowledge according to local historical
politics, power, and influence. Here, I hope to suggest the significance of
industrial discourse to meaning making surrounding new technologies in a given
historical moment while also theorizing how the Variety discourse
intersects with existing and emergent meaning making practices in dynamic ways.

While Variety coverage is inevitably but one facet of a broader
sphere of experience related to how new technologies were made meaningful in a
given historical context, scholars have long relied on this trade publication
to make sense of film history and/or to offer directions for subsequent
historical research.2

The promotional film below is an example of the range of texts circulating around VistaVision that contributed to the range of meanings ascribed to the technology:

Variety itself has recognized its contribution to the
history of cinema, television, and theater and has a history of packaging and
re-packaging content, including film reviews and individual issues for sale in
other media formats.3 The digital archive is similarly commodified; researchers pay for access on a one month limited basis ($60 for access to 50 issues for 4 weeks) or a full year unlimited access ($600).4
The politics of this commodification is evident in Variety’s own efforts to package history for readers: the site offers access to “featured archives,” a selected collection of Academy Award coverage throughout history and offers “custom options” to remove watermarks and frame editions for collectors. In so doing, the editors/curators of the site suggest the value of particular historical moments over others and encourage a hierarchical understanding of the archive. While the politics of this practice are clearly geared for commercial appeal, their significance to the broader process of historical discourse is noteworthy. The archive situates particular kinds of coverage as commercially viable, leaving other types of stories to the waste bin of history.

Additionally, scholars are just beginning to situate Variety coverage historically, drawing on the newly accessible digital archive to present new insights into stars, historical context, scandal, etc.5However, the process of theorizing Variety discourse as
discourse has been under examined. The ways in which Variety set
agendas, established tone and language, situated coverage structurally, and
engaged with ideological meaning making suggests that new exhibition
technologies (at least) were made meaningful within a sphere of influence that
was historically contingent and subject to the dynamics of trade press
habitus6.How this coverage is understood contemporarily is subject to the
individual historian’s efforts at contextualization, historicization, and
theorization of dominant evaluative trends within the press based on available
evidence. Contemporary historians make sense of the politics and policies
enacted during times of technological shifts, at least in part, via the
functioning of the digital archive search mechanisms as much as through the
history afforded by the articles themselves. Beginning to recognize the
theoretical ramifications of digitization in the archival sector should
therefore expand beyond the commonplace discussion of the process of film print
digitization. Some of the questions driving this research include: How did
Variety reporters frame and discuss shifts in technology? Were shifts in
exhibition sector technology (widescreen, Technicolor, etc.) met with
expressions of doubt, enthusiasm, or positioned as harbingers of doom? Did
trends develop across history related to new exhibition technologies? How and
when did a prevailing discourse develop and did it shift in light of industrial
maneuvers and adoption of the technology by major theater chains? Did
“slanguage” develop and if so, when and under what conditions? And finally, how
do we begin to understand the digital Variety archive as a digital source
material and as an analog historical tool?

Each of the technologies under consideration were examined by reviewing
digital files made accessible through the Variety website during the
course of the Summer of 2011 under a faculty-student research grant through
Lewis & Clark College and throughout 2012 as the research took shape in its
current form.7In this case, coverage of widescreen technologies were examined through
keyword searches for the terms “widescreen,” “wide,” “anamorphic,” the brand
names “Cinemascope,” “VistaVision” and “Cinerama,” and followed an evidentiary
pattern for shifts, as when a new key term or technology would appear in a given
edition, a new keyword search would commence, as was the case with the Tushinsky
lens and the term “super-scope” or “C-Scope,” or variations on a brand name, as
in “vistavision,” VistaVision,” and “Vista-Vision.” The first 100 articles were
examined and coded by researchers in a double blind manner for key words, the
appearance of “slanguage,” coded on a scale of evaluative coverage of 1-10 based
on pessimism to optimism toward the technology, and further notated for time,
type of publication (daily vs. weekly), and author. Additional key phrases were
recorded as meaningful quotations that might contribute to a broader
understanding of coverage. The articles were then cross coded for reliability
and the resulting data was compared. Reliability across the sample was
determined to be high and significant.

Widescreen and Technological Discourse(s)

Beginning to investigate the codification of meaning in the Variety
archive entails investigating discourses both within an original historical
context, with unique politics of signification operating within a given culture,
and within a contemporary sphere that is predicated on the realities of access
and the functioning of digital search tools. The former begins with the
recognition that meaning within the archive is related to the circumstances
surrounding the encoding of the technological news in Variety at the time
of authorship, and the encouragement of the audience/readership to comprehend
meanings related to the technologies as truthful, credible, and rational. For
example, the assignation of meaning related to widescreen technologies should be
seen in the context of attempts by the authors and/or editors to “win the assent
of the audience” to the dominant reading of the article/message.8Primarily, in the context of writings on widescreen, this amounts to
aligning the reader with the “inevitable,” “revolutionary,” and “technophilic”
impulses that dominate the coverage. The authors, many of whom are uncredited,
seek to cover debuts with enthusiastic aplomb. This does not mean, of course,
that the authors would have undertaken a conscious effort to assent to the
hegemonic view of technological change, but rather that their work exists within
a context that is marked by tensions between organizational values and
journalistic ones. In fact, given Variety’s somewhat unique orientation
as a trade press, the entirety of all coverage throughout its history should be
viewed in this discursive light. The degree to which trade press writers cover
stories according to values of competition, professionalism, deadline pressures,
etc. vs. concerns over accuracy, and audience reach are inevitably much
different from more traditional newspapers. For instance, Variety
writers engage with a discernibly more editorial approach to industry events,
rarely shying away from hyperbole and sensationalistic appeals. The presumption
here being that the efforts of the writers align with the demands of the
publication to reach readers who are themselves members of the industry with
pre-existing attitudes, beliefs, concerns, and motivations for engaging
technology in particular ways.9

For instance, Cinerama, as it appeared in the coverage, was introduced in
the following manner in the weekly Variety from October 25, 1950, and
subsequently in discussion in the later days of 1952.

This is the “This is Cinerama” referenced in the articles below:

Examples from daily and weekly Variety discussing Cinerama. Click for full size.

What this coverage of Cinerama reveals, outside of the obvious appeals to
technophilia, is the establishment of a mode of address and “frame” for the
technological discourse. The coverage throughout Variety pertaining to
new exhibition technologies across the 1950s appears consistent with a frame
that aligns with more traditional news treatments pertaining to “events, not the
underlying conditions; the person, not the group; conflict, not consensus; the
fact that ‘advances the story’, not the one that explains it.”10

What we see here is an effort made to frame Cinerama as a technology according
to the degree of success of the events surrounding its introduction and
demonstration, rather than a focus on the generative mechanisms and underlying
conditions behind its innovation (particularly the advent and diffusion of
television in the American home).Furthermore, the technology
is made meaningful by virtue of hyperbolic discourse that links the technology
to “revolution,” and all that that suggests for the film industry in light of
previous technological shifts including the coming of sound in the late 1920s.The focus on individuals, rather than groups, personifies the stories and
links the technology to the executive chiefs at the major studios who align
themselves rhetorically with their counterparts in the exhibition sector.These relationships between industrial members from production and
exhibition were historically located relative to divestiture of the major
theatrical chains by the major studios (ongoing during the moment in question),
and that both parties shared financial and industrial interests in
differentiating theatrical experiences from televisual ones.
Furthermore, throughout the coverage of widescreen technologies, as we’ll see
below, the inclusion of dissenting voices as to the viability of a given
technology over another suggests the alignment with traditional news reporting
on conflict over consensus and the desire to sensationalize as a normative
standard within the trade press.

Analyzing discourse structures affords insight into the levels and
dimensions of the discourse relating to widescreen technologies. Beginning with
“lexical items,” or words that contextually express values and norms in opinion
or evaluation, reveals that consistency across the coverage exists. Words
repeat across technological coverage, including “dream,” “bonanza,” “new era,”
“showcase,” and “revolution.” These concepts combine into “propositions”
expressed by surrounding context in the given story. For instance, in an
article appearing in the August 5, 1953 Weekly Edition entitled “Release Skeds
Stepped Up: Clear Shelves of Flat Pix,” the author describes the shift to
widescreen and 3-D pictures and contextualizes “era” accordingly: “It’s figured
that the flats may become antiquated as more and more theatres retool for the
new era product… it’s estimated that by March, 1954, most of the studios will
have cleared their decks of all conventional product.” The propositional
structure here expresses opinion by placing exhibitors who have converted to new
exhibition technologies on the inside of the trend toward new exhibition
technologies and those who haven’t on the outside. “Era” is contextualized as
part of a revolution that transcends all facets of the industry and suggests the
inevitability of the transition to widescreen products. This lexical item is
juxtaposed against “conventional” which here gains a pejorative connotation. In
so doing, the author establishes an evaluative structure that aligns with Teun
van Dijk’s “ideological square,” emphasizing good actions (conversion) while
assigning negative evaluations to those theatres that have yet to “retool.11”
Throughout the discourse, local coherence within an edition’s coverage on
new technologies is supported by a more global orientation towards the coming of
widescreen technologies.

Thematically, the discourse across new technologies beginning with the coming of
sound mirrors this laudatory praise in initial cycles of Variety coverage
of Cinerama.Each time a new technology is innovated, it is
similarly couched in language heralding its potential to irrevocably shift the
industry.Many technologies, though, become subject to
longitudinal shifts in attitude and coverage within the trade press.For instance, some three years after the initial coverage of Cinerama,
writers were more hesitant in their coverage, pointing to flaws in the
technology, a lack of interest due to limits and the cost of Cinerama
conversion, and the benefits of competing technologies.
Skepticism over the viability of Cinerama was displaced, however, by coverage of
CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd AO, and SuperScope.
CinemaScope dominated trade coverage throughout 1953 and 1954, as 20th
Century Fox made significant in-roads towards converting the existing
infrastructure to widescreen.Coverage consistently tracked
the conversion and the potential of the format for new revenues following the
premiere of The Robe (Koster 1953).However,
CinemaScope in particular quickly became subject to commodification trends, as
reporters tracked the numbers and the box office, but failed to address the
aesthetic, industrial, and cultural differences afforded by the new technology.Furthermore, coverage of CinemaScope also became a crucial element to the
conversationalization of discourse pertaining to new exhibition technologies.This process, within the Variety discourse, is tantamount to the
development of “slanguage.”Slanguage exists as a discourse phenomenon that establishes insiders and
outsiders.Readers “in the know” understand the derivation of
a given term and may even elicit pleasure from its decoding.
Those outside the group are left without context and denotation to establish
meaning.In the case of widescreen technologies, slanguage
develops as early as February 4, 1953, in an article entitled, “Now Call ‘Em
Flats,” wherein the author (uncredited) encourages the reader through imperative
rhetorical address to shift the lexicon and call all non widescreen/3D pictures
“flats.”While the term doesn’t exactly catch on with the
readership, five articles appearing throughout the calendar year 1953 feature
the term “flats” in this manner.Furthermore, the role played
by slanguage within the readership likely contributes to the overall process of
conversationalization of discourse; the development of terminology pertaining to
new exhibition technologies would have encouraged exhibitor-readers to make
sense of the discourse as more permanent, more viable than otherwise.
Here is an example of a film trailer that further aligns CinemaScope with spectacle, the star system, and sexuality while differentiating the process from 3-D:

CinemaScope, though a major focus of the trade discourse throughout its diffusion into theaters, was subject to the development of slanguage itself; the term “C-Scope” stood in for the full term in headlines and news stories alike. This shortening is a mechanism of editorial convenience to be sure, but it also reflects the alignment of the trade press with the discursive strategies of 20th Century Fox in pushing exhibitors to feel comfortable with the price, the technology itself, and the process of conversion. Yet another prevailing trend within the discourse related to widescreen technologies was the continual focus on conflict over consensus, albeit within a global coherency that favored the technologies as inevitable. For instance, after a period of laudatory praise for CinemaScope, ten articles appear throughout March and April 1954 related to the mandate from 20th Century Fox to install stereo sound equipment to accompany the widescreen image and screen. The authors repeatedly reference contrarians who resist sound conversion, particularly rural theatre owners. This conflict between hesitant exhibitors and the studio reached its peak as Paramount introduced its own widescreen technology, VistaVision, in late April 1954. While the coverage praised the new market entry, the executives at Paramount were careful to encourage the press to resist an all out format battle within the discourse, as evidenced by the headline, “Keep it Wide, But Also Tall: And Speak Well of CinemaScope.12”
In dictating to exhibitors at technology demonstrations how Paramount
wanted them to contextualize and make meaningful their own widescreen process
and encouraging Variety technology writers to orient coverage of the
trade press accordingly, executives at the major studios sought to control how
and under what circumstances exhibitor-readers, industrial partners, and
competitors made meaning relating to widescreen technologies. In this
particular case, Paramount sought to maintain good public relations with both
exhibitors already converted to CinemaScope and potential clients of VistaVision
who shied away from public confrontation and mud-slinging or who were still on
the fence regarding conversion. Here again we see an example of
insider/outsider discourse within the press related to the construction of
hegemonic discourse. Paramount’s President Barney Balaban chose to be gracious
in public when it came to entrenched technology rivals, thanking everyone for
making VistaVision a reality, including CinemaScope pioneers. His strategic
rhetoric belies its potential to support hegemony and the inevitability of
technological conversion. By demonstrating restraint and by utilizing inclusive
language, Balaban asserts his control over the discourse.

Perhaps not surprisingly, coverage of each of the widescreen technologies
introduced in the 1950s follows the pattern of discourse established above,
suggesting that the authors and editors at Variety consistently favored
new exhibition technologies in their battle to differentiate product while the
studios maintained an economic and technological interest in the exhibition
sector.Each technology in Hollywood’s broader history of
change, whether sound, widescreen, 3-D, or stereophonic sound, is unique in the
circumstances surrounding innovation and diffusion. Therefore, coverage of each
technology varies according to factors sociopolitical, economic, and
industrial-cultural; many share characteristics and trends within the discourse
that may be illustrative of Variety’s orientation writ large towards new
exhibition technologies.

After a period of extreme optimism within the coverage, typically lasting a few
months to just over a year, wherein slanguage may be established and a
technophilia predominates, coverage tends to hedge, as complicating factors in
the adoption process are revealed.For instance, in the case
of CinemaScope, appearing as it did on the heels of Cinerama, was heralded as
holding the promise for revolution that Cinerama squandered.
Its affiliation with 20th Century Fox seemed to contribute to the
coverage, as writers such as Fred Hift, Harold Myers, and Gene Arneel
consistently focused on the inter-studio politics behind films being shot and
subsequently released in scope.However, the discourse also
reflects that these writers, as dramatists on par with some screenwriters of the
era, begin to focus on conflict, individual personalities, and squabbles.CinemaScope became, in this period of coverage, a fulcrum point between
cities and rural theater chains, between mandates from studios to convert to
stereo sound with CinemaScope and resistance from exhibitors.
The technological discourse therefore should be seen as dynamic, fluid,
dramatized perhaps, and certainly not outside the influence of sensationalistic
appeal.

Archival Discourse and the Variety Archive

In order to theorize the archive as a means through which to understand
“discourse,” the concept must be applicable to both social theory, including the
work of Michel Foucault, and its linguistic application.13
I’d like to suggest, as Fairclough does, that discourse be considered both
as a use of spoken and written language and as a form of social practice
that is constitutive of meaning making.In so doing, the
Variety discourse is linked to social practice that is socially and
historically situated while in a relationship to other systems of knowledge.I therefore argue that the use of language within Variety is both
socially shaped, by existing attitudes and experiences with new technology
generally and exhibition technologies more specifically, and socially
constitutive, based on, for instance, how theater owners come to understand new
technologies.I argue that each article appearing in
Variety contributes toward shaping how widescreen technologies are
understood within the readership.The particular
circumstances around each article’s publication and its placement and context of
publication also contributes to that process of meaning-making.Within this dynamic, coverage engages with and contributes to the
creation and maintenance of social identities (for instance stake-holders,
innovators, early adopters, rural and urban theater owners, etc. pertaining to
widescreen), social relations (or the dynamic attitudes and behaviors of those
stake-holders towards each other), and systems of knowledge and belief
(attitudes, opinions, and emotions pertaining to the benefits and risks
associated with each technological option) such that one element among the three
may predominate among the others.It is evident that
Variety plays a crucial industrial function in meaning making as well as the
creation and maintenance of power within industrial relationships.

A discourse analysis of the Variety archive is aided by the
researcher/theorist to integrate Stuart Allan’s (1998) work on discourse
analysis in light of the Cultural Studies tradition, Fairclough’s (1995) work on
media texts and contexts, as well as van Dijk’s model linking social actors,
their cognitive structures, and discursive expression. Allan’s assessment of
Stuart Hall’s ‘encoding/decoding’ model (1980) aligns three ‘moments’ of media
communication in relation to the naturalization of dominant forms of ‘common
sense’ in order to show how news discourse reproduces ideology, social
divisions, and hierarchies.14
Allan suggests that the moment of production (encoding), the moment of the text,
and the moment of meaning negotiation (decoding), are interrelated to the extent
that the discourse naturalizes itself as common sense via framing.For instance, an article from the Weekly Variety dated May 16,
1956 entitled “CinemaScope in Black & White Pends at 20th” that
details the flexibility of 20th Century Fox’s policy regarding color
vs. black and white productions made for CinemaScope under Spiros P. Skouras
reproduces industrial divisions by focusing on the failure of mandates from the
company (color and magnetic sound), the cost of optical and magnetic printing,
and the ongoing conflict over television by referencing Skouras’ disdain for
subscription television. In so doing, the article contributes to the maintenance
of the ongoing discourse detailing conflict between the studios and between the
film and television industries.An alternative frame could
have situated the policy decision of the studio head in the context of successes
in the format and the desire for aesthetic variety.

Van Dijk (1988) argues that discourse structures range from micro-level content
such as lexical items to macro-level themes expressed indirectly across the
discourse.According to van Dijk, the reader assigns
coherency at the macro-level and micro-level according to broader systems of
pre-existent knowledge.The reader can thereby make sense of
the information according to not only what is present, but what may have been
omitted or how the item might be understood in light of other contextual
happenings.The aforementioned “CinemaScope in Black & White
Pends at 20th” therefore becomes meaningful within the discourse via
the omission of reference to competing technologies. This can be seen with
VistaVision and within the broader context of television distribution, rural
theater chains’ conflict over magnetic sound conversion, and the associated
contextual knowledge of trends in conversion to widescreen across the industry.Van Dijk further asserts that discourse functions to develop an
“ideological square” that divides insiders and outsiders (via editorials and
opinion pieces in his research) in order to sway opinion and include the reader
(presumably) as insiders.As we have seen, Variety
discourse inevitably functions in this manner: the development of “slanguage”
and the ubiquitous cross-referencing of industrial phenomena within the
publication divides the “insider” readership from outsiders and encourages
hierarchical organization of members of the culture.In the
“CinemaScope in Black & White Pends at 20th” article, lines like
“(h)e pointed out that Metro had announced plans for the first b&w C’Scoper,
‘The Power and the Prize’” serves to include insiders familiar with the
slanguage “Metro” for MGM, “b&w” for black and white, and “C’Scoper” for
CinemaScope production while excluding those outside of the ideological square.

Fairclough, drawing on the work of Michael Halliday and van Dijk, also
devises a tripartite division of discourse components.15
The first is the text or discourse analysis and avails the researcher with
information pertaining to the use of vocabulary and syntax as well as structure.The second category examines how discourse practices contribute to the
construction of the text, how it is interpreted, and how it is distributed.Fairclough suggests that social practices be analyzed in an effort to
reveal how discourse relates to ideology and power.This
engagement reveals what Fairclough identifies as two crucial trends in media
discourse:commodification (also referred to as
“marketization”) of discourse and conversationalization of discourse.While both trends point to the increasingly intertextual nature of media
discourse, the former refers to the process by which commercial models of
language and media-use encroach on pre-existing discourses (as when advertising
language begins to influence feature film story design and the integration of
product placement).The latter term refers to the increased
informality in language, particularly the news, whereby power and authority are
masked in the process of increased stylization and editorialization.While Fairclough locates these trends historically in the 1980s,
commodification and conversationalization are themes within the Variety
coverage of new exhibition technologies throughout the 1950s.
To wit:an article appearing in the April 28, 1954 Weekly
Variety entitled “Allied ‘Watchdogs’ Bark Happily at VistaVision Moon,”
details the reaction of the Allied States Association, a trade group of
exhibitors at odds with Fox’s requirements to convert to magnetic stereoscopic
sound with CinemaScope, to the demonstration of VistaVision in New York by
Paramount.The article demonstrates that the commodification
process herein includes applying a metaphorical frame to an industrial
organization in order to be evocative and to provide emphasis through
exaggeration.The stylization here is also apparent as the
author masks the power position of the subjects via playful analogy.

Speculating on a broader level about the significance of the archive to
authority, discourse, power, and meaning-making requires historical and
theoretical perspective.While the Variety archive
presents a collection of industrial news coverage constituting discourses that
reflect part of the historical/technological/industrial discourse at that
particular moment, the archive also exists as an archive, and is
therefore subject to unique, overlapping discourses pertaining to authority and
historiography.For instance, how we understand and theorize
the processes of digitization to archives in terms that go beyond the aesthetic,
historical, theoretical, and practical implications of digital remastering of
film prints affords theoretical insight into the ramifications for researchers
of such processes.Film archives typically consist of films,
contracts, scripts, memos, advertising, film stills, and corporate documents
such as pay slips, intra-office memoranda, and the like.Some
archives include personal holdings of particular directors or stars, and are
supplemented by letters from fans, between stars, and their personal diaries.Researchers have a tangible experience holding these items, examining
them in person within the institutional context of the collection.How that engagement shifts when access is digitized requires further
examination and theorization.

Besides individual collections, film archives are often composed of entire
studio materials.For instance, the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, holds the “official” records for United Artists.
Film archives, unlike other historical holdings by museums, are notably
contemporaneous in their collections.Instead of relying on
found evidence from archaeological digs, film holdings are most often the
remnants of directorial or corporate packrats.The holdings
of particular museums are selected based on their potential to future
generations of scholars and historians.However, the
selection process is necessarily purposive on two fronts.
First, the surviving family of a given “star” (most often an actor, director, or
producer) selects the material they find most suitable to historical
countenance.The family is concerned, most often, with
maintaining the legacy of the star in question, and therefore may employ a
process of editing to the available material.Secondly, the
leading archivist at the given institution deems the material suitable and/or
acceptable, thereby imposing an institutional legitimacy on the collection.The reputation of the institution, the authority of the archivist, along
with the institutional pressure to provide “intrigue” to the archive are no less
central concerns in the gathering of materials.As a result,
many film archives should be examined in light of these competing agendas, with
an eye towards the politics of inclusion and exclusion, and the broader
historical evidence available.

When theorizing the Variety archive, however, these questions
become more or less displaced in favor of new ones; the fact that the archive is
complete in its collection and archived digitally for online access removes some
of the politics and exclusionary dynamics behind the catalogue’s materials.
Seemingly, the archive establishes authority by virtue of its completeness,
thereby implicitly imbuing its articles and editions with historical relevancy
and power. However, questions arise that align the archive with broader
questions from the field of digital heritage studies, connected to the work of
Fiona Cameron, Nina Simon, Herminia Din, Loic Tallon and others who examine
information, space, access, interpretation, objects, production, and futures in
wide reaching inquiries into the nature of curatorship and provision in light of
digitization.16
For our purposes, this field of research raises questions of space and context as it pertains to access to coverage of widescreen technologies. For instance, all of the examples I raise herein were accessed via single page displays from the digital archive, before being examined online and then printed for further examination and coding. Issues accessed “live” (connected to the archive via the internet) through keyword search reveal single pages with stories containing keywords in high resolution quality. Once the page is downloaded to the computer, the resolution becomes highly degraded, such that the stories become virtually illegible. However, once printed, the page regains its clarity and readability, albeit with a large watermark. This process of access, degradation, and restoration is undoubtedly an effort to impose Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies on the archive to limit piracy. The ramifications for the researcher, though, are several-fold.17
The process of encryption suggests value to the researcher; limits and control suggest scarcity in the marketplace and legitimize the archive’s authority. Furthermore, the very act of encryption aligns the archive with industrial, mainstream content and distribution strategies that place the archive within a broader thematic range of meaning relative to “Hollywood” and legitimacy. Finally, the processes of data management, encryption, watermarking, etc. contextualize the archive relative to ongoing debates and regulation pertaining to free culture, digital piracy, governmental regulation, control, access, etc.18
Therefore, the meanings embedded in the process of digital access to the archive hinge on these circulating macro-level discourses which complement the micro-level engagement with history as represented through the trade discourse.

While the contexts surrounding the archive contribute to how it functions
discursively as a site of contestation surrounding digital content, the
interface and its functionality also contribute to how the archive creates
meaning and limits or de-limits historical perspective. For instance, articles
may appear within the context of their original pagination, but outside of the
context of their original issue in its entirety. How these stories become
meaningful in this context, or de-context if you will, is noteworthy. Each page
appears via keyword search mechanisms alone, apart from the other pages that
would have amounted to the full daily or weekly Variety publication. For
instance, the New York debut of SuperScope on March 10, 1954 was given top
billing on a technology focused page (page 4 of the Weekly Variety)
featuring 10 other stories about widescreen, but viewing that page alone removes
these stories from their publication and historical context. The scholar,
without the edition in hand, might miss the story on that week’s cover about the
$300K television spectacular planned by General Foods in an effort to “Save TV
for NY Campaign,” never mind potentially missing entirely both the daily
edition’s headline, “TV’s flight to coast worries NY,” and the story on
“C-Scope” if the search keyword was limited to the term “Cinemascope.” The
function of the search tool therefore limits the nature of scholastic inquiry,
forcing the researcher to conduct additional searches in order to broaden the
contextual view.

Examples of different search results for Cinemascope. Click for full size.

Missing the connection being made editorially between television technologies,
shifting production geographies, and the coming of widescreen would limit the
researcher to a somewhat myopic view of history.That said,
the results of the research indicate a great deal about how discourse is shaped
through a trade publication, and how that publication may structure certain
types of language, thus potentially encouraging constituents/readers to think
about a given technology in a particular manner.

Conclusion

Many of us are indebted to Variety for its unparalleled coverage of
industrial phenomena, ephemera, and slanguistic panache.We
draw upon it daily and weekly, online and in print to keep up with the world of
entertainment, awards, production schedules and details, and of course, we seek
it out to help us understand industrial thinking on new technologies and shifts
in industrial structures and practices.Scholars have long
sought out Variety for contextual information or historical clues that
might lead to discovery in archives around the world.We now
have the unique opportunity to consider the Variety archive unto itself
as a digital repository of American film culture filled with clues and context,
discourse and discursivity.As I have begun to suggest here,
the archive needs to be understood accordingly; it exists at the intersection of
history and theory and offers us opportunities to unpack the workings of
industrial, technological, trade, cultural, star, and myriad other discourses.How these discourses begin to overlap and under what circumstances they
shift is rich terrain for future research.

As I have shown, the Variety archive is meaningful in both contemporary
and historical/historiographic contexts.As a digital record
of a trade publication, it exists as an authoritative account that reflects the
corporate/journalistic development of industrial discourse across history.Beginning to contextualize and theorize the digitization of the
Variety archive and the ramifications therein, however, requires that we
broaden our understanding of digital heritage and the functioning of archival
authority.We need to understand the politics of search
engines, the decontextualization of articles due to limits in keyword branching,
and the ramifications and limits of algorithmic research to the writing of
history in the digital era.Digital interfaces that restrict
and filter information without transparency limit contextual engagement and
understanding.

Discourse analysis of technological shifts throughout the 1950s pertaining
to widescreen reveal the dynamic function of language, structure, context,
power, hegemony, and social activity. Of the coded articles pertaining to
widescreen technologies dating between 1950 and 1954, a full 51% were coded to
be “extremely optimistic” in assessing the potential of the given technology.
This means that these articles were coded between 8 and 10 on the 10 point
optimism scale used by the coders. Conversely, only 14% of coverage fell in the
“extremely pessimistic” category, ranging in the scale between 1-4. Of this
coverage, many of the articles read as reactionary objections on principle,
including such lines as “Drive-ins are the healthiest part of exhibition and
just don’t need the fancying up treatment,” which appears in an appropriately
titled article “Phil Smith sees no drive-in fancying up” from March 17, 1954.
What this reveals about the functioning of the trade discourse historically is
clear: technophilic themes engage and combine with opinion and editorial
discourse trends to create insider/outsider dynamics that contribute to
meaning-making and encourage the march of technological change throughout
history.

Bryan Sebok is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. His research interests include topics related to conglomeration, new technologies, digitization, and industrial shifts in the contemporary and historical media industries. Professor Sebok is also a working documentarian, with a feature documentary currently shooting in Portland.